Heartsease

V

BUT even in sleep there was no safety. She dreamed about the bull which had chased her at Splatt Bridge, and woke from the nightmare in a wringing sweat, to lie in the faint grayness of first light and remember how huge and murderous he had seemed, how slowly Scrub had answered the rein and then had vanished, so that she was standing in the sopping grass while the bull hurtled down towards her, foaming, mad, untethered ... It was a long time before she slept again.

The proper morning began with bellowings, not a bull’s but Uncle Peter shouting and slamming round the house. Luckily this happened when the light was already broad across the uplands and the unmilked cows beginning to low plaintively in the byre, because (as often happens when the first snow falls) everyone slept longer than usual. Margaret dozed on, conscious at moments of the rummaging and thumping, until in the middle of a meaningless dream her shoulder was grasped

and shaken hard. She opened her eyes and saw Aunt Anne, still in her nightrobe, face taut with worry, bending over the bed.

“Marge, Marge,” she whispered.

Margaret sat up into the numbing air.

“What’s the time?” she said.

“Marge, they’ve gone, Tim and Lucy, and they’ve taken Pete’s second pair of boots and a shoulder of mutton and some bread. What shall I do?”

“Does he know what they’ve taken?” The habit of secrecy kept Margaret’s voice low.

“No. I noticed the boots. He’s mostly cross because the stove isn’t lit and the porridge not on.”

“I’ll light it. Lucy must have heard Mr. Gordon talking to you. I shouldn’t tell him anything. Can’t you just be sleepy, Aunt Anne? If he’s really angry he won’t notice.”

“He’s milking the cows now. But what’s happened to them? In this weather, too?”

“Oh, I’m sure they’re all right. Lucy knows what she’s doing.”

Margaret realized as she spoke that she’d got her emphasis a little too strong. Aunt Anne stared at her, opening and shutting her mouth several times.

“What about Jo?” she hissed at last.

“Jo?” said Margaret, misjudging the surprise this time. “Has he gone too?”

Aunt Anne’s bony fingers dug into her shoulders and she was shaken back and forwards until her head banged the wall and she cried out aloud.

“You know what I mean,” whispered Aunt Anne.

“Yes,” said Margaret, “but you can’t stop Jo doing what he wants to, can you?”

Aunt Anne sat on the bed and said, “No. No. Never.”

“I’ll do Lucy’s work until you can find someone else. Can’t you tell Uncle Peter it’ll be two mouths less to feed through the winter? And you could tell him what Mr. Gordon said too — then he’d know why they’ve gone — I’m sure he’s worried about it. I was talking to him in the byre last night.”

Aunt Anne began to rock to and fro on the bed, moaning and saying, “Oh dear, oh dear.” Margaret sat and waited for her to stop, but she went on and on until Margaret was frightened enough to slide out of bed and run along the passage to find Jonathan, who was yawning while he dressed.

“Come quick,” she whispered. “Your mother’s not well.”

He walked to her room and stood for several seconds in the doorway, watching the rocking figure. Then he slipped his arm round her waist, pulled her wrist over his shoulder and walked her back towards her own bedroom.

“Get some breakfast for Father,” he said as he went through the door. “Don’t dress — go down in your gown.”

So there was kindling to be fetched from the scullery and the fire to be lit in the still-warm stove and little logs to be fed into it through the reeking smoke (that chimney was always a pig in a north wind) and the pots and kettles to be arranged in the hottest patches. Uncle Peter stormed in before anything was ready and threw himself into his chair where he glowered and growled. Margaret tiptoed to the larder and found a corner of boiled bacon and one of yesterday’s loaves; while she was looking round for something to appease an angry and hungry farmer she noticed the little bottles of cordial, so she unscrewed the top of one and poured it into a pewter mug, which she carried into the kitchen and put on the table at his elbow. He picked it up, sniffed it and took a sip. When she came back with the bread and bacon he was tilting the mug to swallow the last drop. He banged the pewter back onto the table.

“Ah, that’s something like,” he said. “You’ve the right ideas, Marge girl.”

“I’m afraid it will be twenty minutes before I can give you anything properly hot, Uncle Peter.”

“Never mind, lass, never mind. I’ll make do.”

He picked up the thin, gray-bladed knife and hacked off a crooked slice of bread and a crookeder hunk of bacon.

“Gone!” he shouted through a mouth full of yellow teeth and munched crumbs and lean and fat.

“Aunt Anne told me,” said Margaret.

“But why, but why?” shouted her uncle. “After all we did for ’em, too!”

“I think she must have overheard what Mr. Gordon was saying about Tim. Shall I fetch you another bottle of cordial?”

“Aye. No. Aye. No, better not. Bring me a mug of cider. What was Davey saying, then?”

“About Tim really being a witch, You were talking about it too, yesterday evening.”

“Ah. He’s a deep one, Davey. What do you think now, Marge, hey?”

“I don’t know. I still don't see how a zany could be a witch. This porridge is warm enough to eat now — would you like some?”

“Leave it a minute more. I like it proper hot. You go and dress, lass, and I'll fend for myself. I must go and tell Davey Gordon what's up, and soon as may be.”

Margaret spun out her dressing, and when she came down again the kitchen was empty. She opened the door into the yard and looked out; Uncle Peter’s footmarks were the only blemish on the level snow, great splayed paces striding up towards the gate. If you knew what you were looking for you could just see two faint dim-plings running side by side towards the shed — the lines made by the sledge runners when they'd come back, but covered with new-fallen snow; the marks of their outward journey had vanished. She turned at the sound of a light step behind her; Jonathan had sidled up to study the black-and-white landscape.

“Jo, I thought of something," she whispered. “Won’t someone notice that the sledge is wet?”

“I left it under the hole in the roof, where there was piles of snow coming in. I put some bundles of pea-sticks over the place when we left, so the ground’s fairly dry underneath, too. It ought to look all right.”

“How’s Aunt Anne?”

“I don’t know. Tell anyone who asks she’s got a fever.”

Then Mr. Gordon and his cronies came catcalling down the lane and trampled to and fro over the yard

until even the marks of Uncle Peter’s first crossing were scuffled out, let alone the lines left by the sledge. Air. Gordon stood in the melee, head thrown back to sniff the bitter air.

“Clear!” he cried at last. “Sweet and clear! Peter, your farm’s clear of wickedness now, or my name’s not Davey Gordon.”

“The zany, was it?” cried one of the stonecutters.

“Sure as sure,” cackled Mr. Gordon. “And that sister of his, too, like enough.”

“She always had a sly look,” said another of the men. “Where’d they come from, anyone know?”

“Bristol,” called Margaret from the porch.

“Aye, so you told me before,” answered Mr. Gordon. “That’s where they’ll be heading then. Out and after them, boys.”

But it was a quarter of an hour before the men even left the farm, because they kept telling each other how right they were, and repeating old arguments as if they were new ones. Amid this manly furore no one spared a second to ask after Aunt Anne; and when they departed Uncle Peter went with them.

He left a hard day’s work behind for two children who’d been up most of the night — the byre to be mucked out, hay carried in, ponies to be tended, sheep to be seen to, hens to be fed and their eggs found, the two old sows to be fed too — besides all the most-used paths to be shoveled clear before the snow on them was trodden down to ice too hard to shift. Jonathan ran down to the stream and fetched the hired man to help with the heaviest work, so by the time Uncle Peter came back, bored with the useless hunt and angrily ashamed with himself for leaving the farm when there was so much to be done, most of the important jobs were finished. Aunt Anne stayed abed all day, and Margaret was staggering with tiredness when she carried the stew-pot to the table for supper; but she opened another bottle of cordial for him (Aunt Anne rationed him to a bottle on Sundays) and he leaned back in his chair and belched and scowled at the roofbeams.

“Glad we didn’t catch ’em, sort of,” he said suddenly.

Margaret cleared away in a daze of exhaustion and went to bed. When she looked down from the top of the stairs he was still lolling there, his cheeks red in the firelight and mottled with anger and drink, and his shadow bouncing black across the far wall. He looked like a cruel old god waiting for a sacrifice.

Too tired to bother with lanterns or candles she felt her way into bed and dropped at once into that warm black ocean of sleep which waits for bodies strained to the edge of bearing, and slept too deep for dreams.

Next day Aunt Anne seemed worse. She lay under her coverlet with her knees tucked almost up to her chin, and all she said when anyone tiptoed in to offer her a mug of gruel or a boiled egg was “Leave me alone Leave me alone.” Uncle Peter, after two attempts to comfort her (quite good attempts — worried, voice gentle), lost his temper with the unreasonableness of other folk and stumped off round the farm, furiously banging the milk pails together and when milking was done starting on the unnecessary job of restacking the timber pile and refusing to be helped. Margaret took him out a flagon of cider in mid-morning (having poured half a bottle of cordial in first) but was otherwise far too busy with housework and cooking to pay attention to him or anyone else. Luckily Aunt Anne had done the baking two days ago, so there was bread enough for two days more, but even so there were hours of work to be done. When you have no machines, a household can only be kept sensible if certain jobs are done on certain days of the week, others on certain days of the month, others every day, and others fitted in according to season. Margaret usually hated housework; but now that Aunt Anne was moaning and rocking upstairs she was in charge, so she polished and scrubbed and swept with busy pleasure, humming old hymn tunes for hours on end.

It was only when she was laying the table for lunch that she realized that Jonathan was missing; she ran out to the paddock, and found that Caesar was missing too. Scrub trotted up for a gossip, but she could only spare him a few seconds before she ran back to clear the third place away, to pour the other half-bottle of cordial into Uncle Peter’s tankard so that he wouldn’t notice when she sploshed the cider in on top, and to think of a good lie. Luckily the stew smelled rich enough to tempt an angry, hungry man.

“Where’s that Jo?” he said at once when he saw the two places.

She ladled out the best bits of meat she could find and added three dumplings (Aunt Anne would frown and purse her lips when she found how lavish Margaret had been with the precious suet).

“I sent him down to Cousin Mary,” she said. “She’s got a bad leg and I didn’t know how she’d be making out this weather. I know Aunt Anne doesn’t speak with her, but I thought she’d rather we did something than that we didn’t.”

Uncle Peter chewed at a big gobbet of meat until his mouth was empty enough for speech, if only just.

“We’d all be happier if we hadn’t any relations,” he growled. “None at all.”

Margaret tried to sound shocked, because that was obviously what he wanted.

“What a horrid thing to say — why, you wouldn’t have any of us!”

He laughed, pleasedly.

“Aye, maybe,” he said, “but a man ought to be able to choose.”

He scooped up another huge spoonful of stew, which gave Margaret time to think what she was going to say next.

“But then you wouldn’t have anybody who had to stick by you. You’d only have friends and . . . and people like Mr. Gordon.”

He munched slowly, thinking it his turn.

“Right you are,” he said. “But mark you, I didn’t choose him neither. He chose me. And what I say is . . .”

Between mouthfuls he told Margaret more about the village than he’d told her in years. Mr. Gordon was right, but he had too much power and influence for a man in his station, and that had maybe turned his head a trifle. It was Squire’s fault, and Parson’s. Squire was a

ninny and Parson was a drunkard. The whole village was sick. But you couldn’t fight Davey Gordon and his gang, because nobody else would dare stand up for you. It was better to belong with them, and then at least you knew where you were. And, certainly, Davey had an uncanny nose for witchcraft of all kinds, and it was better to live in a sick village than one riddled with witches. And mark you, Marge girl, witch-hunting was good sport — better than cock-fighting.

When he’d finished his harangue Margaret fetched him bread and cheese and went upstairs to see whether she could do anything for Aunt Anne. She was asleep at last, straightened out like a proper person. Margaret slipped out and settled down to a long afternoon of housewifery. She was feeding the eager hens in the early dusk when Jonathan came back, riding Caesar, who looked bewildered by the distance he’d suddenly been taken, as if he’d never realized that the world was so large.

“How’s Mum?” said Jonathan in a low voice.

“Better, I think; anyway she’s asleep and lying properly. I told your father you’d gone to see whether Cousin Mary was all right.”

“Good idea. Our lot are, anyway. Lucy’s found a little rowboat and tethered the tug right across the dock so that she can’t drift about — she’s a clever girl, given the chance. And she and Tim got Otto down into the cabin, where there’s a stove, so they won’t freeze. I took them enough food for three days, I hope.”

“Did you try the footpath?”

“Yes, but there’s a locked gate across it, so it was a good thing we didn’t try it. It would be faster than going through Hempsted, if I can break the gate open. I didn’t see your dogs, but I heard them; if they smell Lucy and the others it’s going to be much more dangerous visiting the dock.”

“But couldn’t we tow them further along the canal, down to the bit beyond Hempsted? No one lives there or goes there.”

“I can’t start the engines, supposing they’ll go, until Otto’s well enough to show me how, and once they’re started they’ll bring people swarming round. When we do go, we’ll have to get down the canal and out to sea all in one rush.”

“If you can break that gate, Scrub could tow them for a few miles: that’d be enough.”

“You and your Scrub! Could he really?”

“Oh, yes, I think so. You’re so busy thinking about machines that you never remember what animals can do.”

“Well, you think about them enough for both of us.” “Not so loud, Jo!”

“It’s all right — it’d look funny if we spent all our time whispering to each other. Next time we can both get away I’ll climb out the night before and hide that old horsecollar in the empty house at the top of Edge Lane. We mustn’t be seen taking it.”

But that wasn’t for a full week. Aunt Anne’s mind-sickness left her, but a strange fever followed it which made all her joints ache whenever she moved, so she lay drear-faced in bed or else tried to get up and do her duty as a farmer’s wife with such obvious pain that

Margaret couldn’t possibly leave her to cope. Twice Uncle Peter had to carry her up to her bed. Then he asked around the village for somebody to take Lucy’s place and found a cousin of Mr. Gordon’s who’d been living over in Slad Valley. Her name was Rosie, and she was a bustling, ginger-haired, sharp-voiced woman of thirty, chubby as a pig and with sharp piggy eyes which watched you all the time. Margaret and Jonathan agreed it was like having an enemy spy actually in the house, but at least her presence gave them the chance to get away for a whole day. Jonathan had been to the boat again, alone, in the meanwhile, but they both knew that the food on Heartsease must be getting low now.

They picked up the hidden horsecollar and rode down to the canal, Caesar still absurdly astonished at the amount of exercise he was suddenly expected to take after years of slouching about unwanted in the paddock. It had snowed several times since their midnight journey, so the world was starched white except for the scribbled black lines of walls and hedges and the larger blobs where the copses stood; the colors of the famished hedgerow birds showed as sharp as they do in a painting. It had frozen most nights, too, and the surface of the snow was as crisp as cake icing but gave with a cracking noise when the hooves broke through to the softer stuff beneath. (This wasn’t the cloying snow which would stick and cake inside the horseshoes, so there was no need to lard the ponies’ feet.) The lane was hardly used this weather, but an old man waved at them from where he was chopping up the doors and staircase of an empty and isolated cottage to carry home for firewood.

“Seasonable weather we’ll have for Christmas, then,” he called.

“Yes,” they shouted together.

“I’d forgotten about Christmas,” muttered Margaret as they took the next slope. “It’s going to make things much harder.”

“Easier, I’d say,” said Jonathan cheerfully. “With all those folk coming and going, no one will notice whether we’re there or not.”

“They’ll notice if there’s nothing to eat, so unless your mother gets better I’ll have to be there.”

“Won’t Rosie . . .”

“If I leave her to do all the work she’ll start asking people where on earth I can have got to — innocent, but meaning. You know.”

“Um. Yes. We can’t risk that, seeing whose cousin she is, too. And another thing, when we’ve shifted Heartsease we’d better go and call on Cousin Mary. Messages get sent at Christmas, and if we keep using her as an excuse and never go there, someone might hear tell of it.”

“Besides,” said Margaret, “she seemed terribly lonely when I did see her.”

In front of the inn at Edge stood a group of men with short boar-spears in their hands, and rangy dogs rubbing against their legs. They waved, like the old man down the lane, but their minds were busy with the coming hunt and the ponies padded by as unnoticed as a small cloud. The runner-lines of a few sledges showed on the big road, but when they dipped into the lane the snow was untrodden — the Vale had little cause to visit the hills, nor the hills the Vale. As they twisted between the tall, ragged hedges Margaret glimpsed vistas of the flat reaches below, dim with snow, all white patches like a barely started watercolor. It looked very different from her earlier visits.

But when they were really down off the hills it felt just the same. As soon as the lane leveled out they came across a bent old woman gathering sticks out of the hedgerow. She glanced piercingly at them as they passed, but gave them no greeting. There was a black cat sitting on her shoulder. She looked like a proper witch.

She was the only soul they saw for the rest of the journey (not many, even of the queer Vale folk, cared to live so close to the city). When they crossed the swing bridge Jonathan reined Caesar to a willing halt and gazed up and down the mottled surface where the snow had fallen and frozen on the listless water. It looked a wicked surface, cold enough to kill and too weak to bear.

“I’m a ninny,” he said. “I should have known it would be like this. We can’t tow her out till it thaws — for weeks, months, even.”

“Wasn’t it frozen when you came down on Tuesday?”

“There were bits of ice on it, but it was mostly water. I think the river must have risen high enough to flood over the top gates — that would have broken up the first lot of ice.”

“What shall we do, then?”

“Go and see them, tell them to look out for the dogs, see how Otto is, give them the food. Then go and visit Cousin Mary.”

The path by the canal was flat and easy, but long before they came to the dock area it was barred by a tall fence of corrugated iron. Jonathan led the way up the embankment, through a gap in a hedge and into the tangled garden of one of the deserted houses between Hempsted and Gloucester. Beyond the level crossing he pushed at a gate on the right of the road, picked his way between neat stacks of concrete drainage pipes and back to the canal. They were just below the docks.

“I found this way last time,” he said. “There she is.”

He pointed along the widening basin. The tug lay in its private ice floe right in the center of the dock, with a hawser dipping under the ice at prow and stern and a dinghy nestling against her quarter.

“It’ll be easier from the other quay,” said Jonathan. “We’ll find a cord and throw it out so that they can pull the food sack across the ice — that hawser’s shorter. Over this bridge is best.”

“I can’t see anyone on her,” said Margaret.

“Too cold. They’ll be keeping snug down below.” They moved in complete silence up the quayside and round an arm of frozen water which stretched south from the main dock until they reached the place where the hawser was tied — a chilly and narrow stretch of quay under a bleak cliff of warehouse. Margaret peered nervously into the cavernous blackness between its open doors, and then squinted upwards to where, eighty feet above her, the hoisting hook still dangled from the black girder that jutted out above the topmost door.

“Ahoy!” called Jonathan.

He was answered by a clamor of baying from the other side of the dock. There was a swirl of movement along the far quay, a shapeless brown and orange and black and dun weltering which spilled over the edge and became the dog pack hurling across the ice towards them.

“In here!” shouted Jonathan, using the impetus of Caesar’s bucking to run him under the arch into the warehouse. Scrub followed, dragging Margaret.

“Door!” he shouted. She let go of the bridle and wrenched at her leaf of the big doors. It stuck, gave, rasped and swung round into the arch. She could see the foremost dogs already on this side of the tug, coming in long bounds, heads thrown back and sideways, jaws gaping. Then Jonathan’s door slammed against hers and they were in total dark.

“Sorry,” he said, “mine was bolted.”

He fiddled with the bottom of the doors while Margaret tensed her back against them and the baying and yapping rose in a spume of noise outside. The dark turned to grayness as her eyes learned to use the light from two grimed windows set high in the furthest wall. She could see the ponies now, standing quite still as though the dark were real night — just the way parrots go quiet when a cloth is thrown over their cage.

“I think that’ll hold it,” said Jonathan. “Hang on, there’s a hook here too. That’s better. Let’s go up and see if we can see anything from above. If there isn’t another way out we’re in a mess.”

The steps to the floor above were more of a broad ladder than a staircase. They found another long room, piled high with sacks of grain which had rotted and spilled their contents across the small railway that ran along the middle of the space from the doors overlooking the dock. The air smelled of mustiness and fermentation, sweet and bad.

“Let’s go higher,” said Jonathan. “They’ll get excited again if we open these doors, but they mayn’t notice if we go right to the top.”

Each floor had the same layout, with the double doors at the end and the railway down the middle between the stacked goods. Different kinds of goods had been stored at different levels; on the second floor the trolley that ran on the rails had been left half unloaded, with two crates of tinned pineapples still on it and a ledger loose on the floor. The very top floor was used for the most miscellaneous items — there was even a bronze soldier in one corner, swathed in the ropes that had been used to handle the crates on the hoist; beside him lay several lorry axles. The roof had gone in a couple of places and patches of snow lay on the floor, but this meant it was much lighter; and when Jonathan pulled the double doors open it felt like sunrise. The girder arm of the hoist stuck out rigid above them, the big hook dangling halfway along. It was a gulping drop to the quay below. Out on the ice the dog pack were sniffing round Heartsease in an absentminded but menacing way. Jonathan leaned against his side of the doorway, quite unaffected by the chilling drop, and teased the back of his skull.

“We need a bomb,” he said.

“Oh, surely they wouldn’t store them here,” said Margaret. “The Army would have . . .”

He grinned across at her and she stopped talking.

“What’s on that trolley?” he asked.

This one hadn’t been unloaded at all. It was covered with small wooden boxes, no larger than shoeboxes, whose labels, still faintly legible, were addressed to the Gloucester Echo.

Margaret tried to pick one up but found she couldn’t move it.

“Printing metal,” said Jonathan. “Must be almost as heavy as lead. The boxes are small, so that a man can lift them. Now that’s what I call a real bit of luck! Let’s see if we can push it. Come on, harder! One, two, three, heave! Fine. Leave it there and we’ll try the hoist. It’ll be electric, but there might be a hand control to run the hook out. Tell me if anything moves.”

He tugged levers without result, then began to turn a large wheel.

“That’s it,” said Margaret excitedly, but still without any idea of what he was up to.

“Good. Now those bits of iron at the end of the rails must be to stop the trolley flying out over that quay if there’s an accident, but there might be a way of moving them.”

“Mine’s got a sort of hook this side.”

“So’s mine, hang on, it’s stuck. Can you see anything to bang it with? Yes, that’ll do. Ouch! Don’t worry, I only grazed my knuckles. Done yours? Fine. Now, just let me work this out.”

“But, Jo, even if you get them right under here, on the quay, you’ll only hit one or two, and . . .”

Jonathan stopped sucking his ravaged knuckle to grin at her.

“I’ve got a better idea. If it works,” he said.

He looked outside, up at the hoist, back at the trolley, down at the drop. Then he wound the hook in, so that he could reach it. Then he made Margaret help him shove the trolley right to the giddy verge. Then he fetched the ropes which festooned the bronze soldier and spent several minutes contriving a lopsided sling from the hook to the trolley. Last of all he wound the hook out almost to the end of the girder and readjusted the ropes. Margaret suddenly saw what would happen if the trolley were pushed the last few inches over the edge—pushed with a rush: it would swing down and out, in a wide curve, trolley and boxes all moving together; but because the far end of the trolley was on longer ropes than the near end, the boxes would start to slide out forwards, and when the swing of the ropes had reached its limit the boxes would all shoot on and be scattered right out across the ice, almost as far as Heartsease; and if the dogs could be lured on to the ice at the right moment . . . she knew what his next words were going to be before he said them.

“You’ll have to be bait, I’m afraid.”

“Bait?”

“Yes, as soon as I’ve found a lever. I want them on the ice halfway between here and Heartsease — it’s the big ones that are the killers. Go down to the bottom, edge one door open, make quite sure you know how to shut it, slip through and shout. Look, they’re bored with the tug and they’re going back to where they were before, so you’ll know just how long it will take them to get across. Stick it out as long as you can, Marge, but get back inside when the first dog is halfway between the boat and the quay — I don’t want to drop a ton of lead on you. If I shout, you’ll know it’s not safe to open the door. All right?”

“All right,” whispered Margaret, sick with terror. The stairs seemed longer going down, the rooms darker, the rustling of rats more obvious — perhaps they’d been scared into brief silence by the clamor of the dogs. Scrub and Caesar were restive: most ponies hate rats. She patted and talked to them both, until she realized she was only doing so to put off opening the door. She walked down between the rails and studied the bolt and the hook — the hook would be quite enough by itself. She was lifting it when she suddenly wondered whether she could hear him down all those stairs, supposing he was shouting to warn her of prowling hounds . . . come on, girl, of course you would — Jonathan wouldn’t have suggested it if it wasn’t going to work. She opened the door eight inches and slipped through the gap into the bitter daylight.

The dogs were over by a warehouse on the far side of the ice, squabbling over something edible. She could hear distant snarlings.

“Ahoy!” she called. Her voice was weak and thin.

“Ahoy!” came Jonathan’s cheerful yell far above her head.

She saw two or three dogs raise their muzzles and look across the ice. She pranced about on the quay, waving both arms to make sure she was seen, because most dogs have poor vision and the wind was blowing from them to her, so that no scent would reach them.

At once it all became like the nightmares you have again and again: the same baying rose; the same swirl of color spilled down on the ice; the same dogs leaped yelping in front, their heads held the same way; the same panic lurched up inside her. She was yards from the door, after her prancing, and rushed madly for it, but when she reached it she saw that the dogs had barely come as far as the tug, so she still had to stand in the open, visible, edible, luring them on. Bait.

But it was only seconds before the first dog reached the rumple in the ice she’d chosen as a mark, and she could slip back in and hook the door shut. As she closed out the last of sky she thought she glimpsed black blobs hurling down.

Then there came a thud, a long, tearing crack, a lot of smaller bangings; the yelping changed its note, faltered and vanished; then there were only a few whimpers, mixed with a sucking and splashing. She unhooked the door, edged it open and poked her head out.

The whole surface of the ice had changed — it had been nothing like as thick as she’d thought and was really only snow frozen together, without the bonding strength of ice. Now the under water had flooded out across a great stretch of it and the part between her and Heartsease was smashed into separate floes, overlapping in places and leaving a long passage of open water. The smaller dogs had not come far enough to be caught and vvere rushing away to the far quay, but most of the larger ones were struggling in the deadly water. As she watched, one which had been marooned on a floating island of ice shifted its position; the ice tilted and slid it sideways into the water; it tried to scrabble back but could find no hold; then it swam across to the fixed ice and tried there, but still there was nothing on the slippery surface for its front legs to grip while it hauled its sodden hindquarters out; it tried and tried. Margaret looked away, and saw several others making the same hopeless effort round the edges of the open water. In the middle two still shapes floated — dogs which had actually been hit by the falling boxes. She shut the door and went trembling up the stairs.

Jonathan had shut his door and was sitting on a bale with his head between his hands. He looked white, even in the dimness.

“It worked,” she said, “but I couldn’t go on looking.” “Nor could I,” he answered. “It’s not their fault they’re killers.”

Margaret was surprised. She was so used, after five years of knowing him well, to his instant reaction to the needs of any happening that she hardly thought about it. Jo would say what to do, and he’d be right. Now, for the second time — the first had been when they’d crouched at the top of the stairs and listened to Mr. Gordon hypnotizing Aunt Anne — he’d buckled under the sudden load of his feelings. He felt the death of the dogs more than she did — she was only shocked, but he felt something deeper, more wounding, in his having done what he had to do. She put her hand under his arm and coaxed him to his feet.

“The ponies are getting worried,” she said.

He followed her listlessly down the dusty flights; the ponies were stamping fretfully in the shadows, but as much from boredom and strangeness as from fear — or perhaps the stress the children felt was making them kick the cobbles in that fretful way. Jonathan walked up to Caesar and slapped his well-padded shoulder.

“Shut up, you fat ninny,” he said. “We could stick it out for months here. Corn for you and pineapples for me and a million rats to talk to.”

Caesar enjoyed being spoken to like that. Margaret fondled Scrub’s nose and gently teased his ears until he was calm. Then she opened the door. The water was almost still now, though two dogs still paddled feebly at the far edge. A few more shapes floated in the middle of the water — the others must have got out somehow, or sunk when they drowned. As she looked, a hatch on Heartsease opened and a cautious head poked out — Lucy’s. Margaret stepped into the open and waved; an arm waved back. Jonathan came and stood beside her, with his usual perky, cat-faced look.

“If they used their pole to break the ice round her,” he said, “they could cast off the far hawser and we could haul her over.”

“Scrub and Caesar could, anyway,” said Margaret.

But it took five minutes of signaling and hallooing before Lucy grasped the idea and persuaded Tim to do the work. Meanwhile Margaret devised a makeshift connection between the near hawser and Scrub’s horse-collar, and an even more makeshift harness for Caesar to do his share of hauling in. Caesar didn’t mind, but the ramshackle and once-only nature of the whole contraption displeased Scrub’s conservative soul, and she had to bully him before he suddenly bent to his task like a pit-pony and began to haul the inert but frictionless mass across the dock. Margaret led the ponies back into the warehouse, so that they could pull straight.

“Whoa!” shouted Jonathan from the quayside, and she hauled back on the bridles. The hawser deepened its curve until it lay like a basking snake along the floor, but it was many seconds before she heard the dull boom of the tug nudging up against the stonework. Three minutes later they had shut the ponies back in the warehouse and were standing on the deck, where Tim was cuddling a draggled yellow blob with a snarling black snout.

“What’s he got?” said Margaret.

“Puppy,” said Lucy. “He fished un off a bit of ice as the boat ran past. Come and see Otto. He’s better — in his mind, that is. He can’t move his legs still, and his side hurts him, but he’s better in his mind.”

She led them below.